Federalism, Free Markets and the Liberty To Let One's Mind Wander.
I Am Very Worried About the Fate of Liberty in the USA, Where Government is Taking people's Lives
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"Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue." -Barry Goldwater-

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

60 minutes on Clarence Thomas....

I read his autobiography a couple of years ago and was moved by this story being one man's journey. No one asks to be put through difficult times like he has, but he has learned and grown from his experience.

An amazing part of book is the story of how Joe Biden sleazily stabbed him in the back during the confirmation hearings and we never hear one peep about this from the press during the year-and-a-half that he was campaigning for President then Vice-President. Another fine example of the amazing job that the media is doing for the benefit of Democrats over the past 30 years. This quote from the book....

Senator Biden was the first questioner. Instead of the softball questions he’d promised to ask, he threw a beanball straight at my head, quoting from a speech I’d given four years earlier at the Pacific Legal Foundation and challenging me to defend what I’d said. ”I find attractive the arguments of scholars such as Stephen Macedo, who defend an activist Supreme Court that would strike down laws restricting property rights.” That caught me off guard, and I had no recollection of making so atypical a statement, which shook me up even more. “Now, it would seem to me what you were talking about,” Senator Biden went on to say, “is you find it attractive the fact that they are activists and they would like to strike down existing laws that impact on restricting the use of property rights, because you know, that is what they write about.”

Since I didn’t remember making the statement in the first place, I didn’t know how to respond to it. All I could say in reply was that “it has been some time since I have read Professor Macedo … But I don’t believe that in my writings I have indicated that we should have an activist Supreme Court.” It was, I knew, a weak answer. Fortunately, though, the young lawyers who had helped prepare me for the hearing had loaded all of my speeches into a computer and at the first break in the proceedings they looked this one up. The senator, they found, had wrenched my words out of context. I looked at the text and saw that the passage he’d read out loud had been immediately followed by two other sentences: “But the libertarian argument overlooks the place of the Supreme Court in a scheme of separation of powers. One does not strengthen self-government and the rule of law by having the non-democratic branch of the government make policy.” The point I’d been making was the opposite of the one that Senator Biden claimed I had made.

Besides the comment that I made earlier that I felt moved by the book as one man's journey, I think that the most compelling message that Clarence Thomas tells is two-fold; first his change of support for the affirmative action and other race based programs that affect people in unintended ways and the recounting of vitriol leveled at him since he is not a conforming man of color on issues that have been determined to be 'important' to other blacks and liberals in the nation.

The money quote from Thomas during the hearings....

This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.

The Supreme Court is a battle site on what has become the sacrosanct ground of false rights surrounding the abortion of new life. A litmus test for new justices of supposed rights of a limited number of people over the unborn is a disgrace and is a symptom of the nihilism that has infected Americans and particularly the liberal arm of the Democratic party.